Left-wing tabloid New York Daily News has endorsed Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Its editorial board described the Ohio Republican as someone who “marries a small government outlook with can-do effectiveness. … On the ideological spectrum …[Kasich] meets the tests of Republican conservatism.”
Translation: Kasich claims to want small, limited government; but in practice, he advocates and champions bigger government, i.e. more government control over the economy, education, health care and private industry. Best example? Obamacare. Kasich loves Obamacare, and would likely expand it, if anything. Opposition to Obamacare is not controversial among Republicans, at least not when they run for office. Even while running for office, Kasich admits to liking it. Just imagine what else he likes of the socialist, Democratic policies.
You cannot marry socialized medicine with can-do effectiveness. Calling anything socialist “can-do” seems like a sick joke. It would be like calling Soviet Russia, Communist North Korea or Communist Cuba examples of “can-do” effectiveness and efficiency; not to mention the post office, public schools or the IRS.
Progressives and Democrats, including those who write for the Daily News, would never, ever vote for John Kasich in a general election. He would lose to these same progressives who endorse him now in a landslide against Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. They don’t care about John Kasich, even if the poor sap John Kasich thinks they care about him.
What these progressives and Democrats like is a candidate who does not threaten them. They’re not looking for a candidate who openly agrees with them. This would create the impression that they have no opposition. They want opposition in theory; but not in reality. Intellectual-political lackeys like John Kasich serve their purpose nicely.
We’ve seen this kind of thing before. John McCain, another Big Government, establishment Republican who strongly supported Democratic “campaign finance reform” (translation: censorship) was the darling of the left-wing media-academic Washington DC establishment; at least, until he ran against Barack Obama. In that campaign, they skewered him, which was easy to do because he was such a horrible candidate.
The Daily News wrote that both Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz “would be disastrous” in the White House, because “Cruz … is an absolutist ideologue” and “Trump because he suffers from the irreparable, disqualifying defect of being Trump.”
America would do well to have an “absolutist ideologue” in the White House, especially if that ideologue favors things like shutting down most of the federal government as we know it, privatizing education and socialized medicine, privatizing retirement and massively reducing the national debt and taxation. Whether Ted Cruz is that ideologue might be open to debate, but if he is, that would be a reason to support him, not oppose him. As for Trump, nobody (including Trump himself, most likely) knows what his ideological positions really are, if he has any, and nobody has a remote clue of what he will do in office, until or unless he gets there.
“No one was more stunned by the Trump phenomenon than Republican leaders who had lost touch with a segment of the party’s base that seethed with anger. A practiced showman and mass marketer, Trump has tried to ride the fury into the White House,” the Daily News wrote in its editorial.
Does it occur to these editorial writers that the fury among Republican voters is based on the facts? The facts being that Republicans, again and again, run people for national office like John Kasich, who claim to support capitalism and limited government, on the one hand, while in practice (once elected) supporting most of the very same things the Democrats support.
Progressives like those running the Daily News think expansive, federal control over most of the economy is a good thing, at least when that control is exercised by fellow progressives. Quite naturally, they want both Republicans and Democrats to agree with them. But people who have a very different point-of-view do not need or want people like John Kasich. They already have that with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Kasich said he wept after The New York Times endorsed him in January.
Of course he did.
Deep down, Republicans-in-name-only like John Kasich desperately want to be loved and liked by the ones they consider their moral superiors. Kasich feels inferior to the Democrats and socialists who run most of academia, the media and the federal government. He wants to be one of them. He cries with disbelief and wonder when they approve of him. He will probably also cry once they brutally reject him, in the general election, when and if he gets to run against Sanders or Clinton.
Whether your Republican choice is Donald Trump, Ted Cruz or neither one, the Republican Party is over – and deserves to be. Long live the pro-liberty, individual rights party that will hopefully one day succeed it. It’s our only possible chance, and if it never happens, America is over.
John Kasich should skip the middleman, come out of the political closet, and just become the Democrat we all know that deep down he is.
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